If You Should Take Me
by Sigridhr
Summary: On the first day of Advanced Vulcan, Nyota sits in the front row, takes meticulous notes and tries not to think about the way her professor's voice makes words like phoneme and morphology sound like something one might say between lovers.


**Notes (13/7/13):** I have added about 500 words to this fic in response to some feedback from notesfromaclassroom, who pointed out that it was pretty OOC to not have Spock and Uhura discuss the whole cadet/professor thing since it could impact both their careers. I am indebted to them for pointing it out, and I hope this addition will serve to address the issue. :)

**An important note about ratings/warnings** I've been asked multiple times now to lower the rating, so I'm caving to peer pressure and moving it from M to T. **This fic contains people having sex**, albeit in a very airy-fairy kind of way. There are no explicit descriptions of actual sexual content, but everything is implied pretty strongly and there's some borderline-racy poetry. I'll leave it up to you as to whether or not you think that might be something you'd like to read.

* * *

Words strain,  
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,  
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,  
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,  
Will not stay still.

– T. S. Eliot, _Burnt Norton_

* * *

Nyota Uhura has always loved words.

It sometimes feels trite to say it. There is a phase when most of her friends love words too, as they pour over Keats and Byron and then pour their souls out onto secret PADDs hoping for sublime anguish and finding only mixed metaphors. She writes along with them, burying PADDs with scribbled poetry in the back of her sock drawer. Hidden away because they're never quite right, always too ordinary. They are a single, punctuated chord, bright like her nail polish. She wants a symphony.

Her mother makes speaking sound like singing. Words slip past her tongue like they're dancing, jumping back and forth between Swahili and Federation Standard laughingly, and Nyota wants to catch them in her hand and hold them. She likes the way some words make her feel – the way _scintillating_ sends tingles up her spine, and _sibilance_ makes her shiver and hush.

She likes short, sharp words that crack and snap when she's angry, hard and fast with a succinct precision that she uses like a physical blow. She likes long and slow words, gloaming and lugubrious, on down days, and she chirps and chatters in the morning, bright as the rising sun. She likes the way some words vibrate when she places them side-by-side, becoming something greater and infinitely more wonderful than the sum of their parts. She likes the way they come together, piecemeal and slipshod.

But above all else she loves to hear them, to really _listen_ and hear the way Swahili sounds like slow laughter and open skies, and Standard like busy streets and polished steel. She speaks Klingon with a deep voice and a straight spine, her words like a sword in her hand and it sounds hard as granite, and as steady and resolute. In Klingon she feels mighty, and she wears it like a costume. In Orion she's too forthright to blush, though she would in any other language. In Orion she wants, she needs, she laughs more freely and feels more deeply, and it's embedded in her grammar, in her body. Each of them in turn unlock something in her soul that she has never known was there, and she dives into them until her favourite words from each rest lightly on the tip of her tongue.

She loves Vulcan most of all.

…

On the first day of Advanced Vulcan she sits in the front row, takes meticulous notes and tries not to think about the way her professor's voice makes words like _phoneme_ and _morphology_ sound like something one might say between lovers.

She writes down everything he says with an attempt at the same dispassion, the same precision, but she can't quite leave the aftershocks of the way his voice makes her think of still water and bedroom hymns out of her lecture notes. There's something elegant in the way he enunciates with careful precision, that's echoed in the length of his fingers and the curve of his ear. He has a careful economy of motion, each word reined in tight and they fall in a line like little soldiers, nothing out of place.

She looks at his name at the top of her PADD, and rolls it around on her tongue. _Spock_. It's succinct and upright like he is.

She knows she's in trouble now.

…

There is a harmony and completeness to Vulcan that she likes. It sings in symmetry, no chords left unresolved, no movements unfinished. Ironically, what it reminds her of most is Gödel's incompleteness theorem – a compact and elegant proof that bares open the wonder of the world that slips beyond their understanding.

Vulcan is a language purged and reconstructed to a refined and dense grammar. It lacks the subtlety of Standard, and sometimes she misses it. In Vulcan, one cannot be irate, or miffed, there was no way to seethe, to snarl, it lacked the subtlety of pique, the roaring of rage and the festering of wrath, and had no way to pull apart fury and ire, to separate irritation from simpler annoyance. There was only anger, devoid of its multi-faceted expressions.

In the Vulcan language, as in the Vulcan people, there are new axioms. Emotion is purged from their speech as effectively as it is from their expressions. It is a language for debate, and a grammar like an equation, where each side must balance. But it is incomplete, because there is no grammar at all, no structure, that can hold all of worldly experience and demonstrate its own consistency.

In Swahili she hears the voice of her heart and the soul of the Earth beneath her feet. She feels grounded, and connected to the grass and the sky, and emotions run quicksilver through her veins. In Vulcan she feels as if she can see the language of the stars writ manifest, remote and cold, and she reaches out into the darkness to pull them down and see what they're made of.

…

The first time she speaks to Spock it's to ask a question about Vulcan's many uses of the subjunctive. She's standing, PADD in hand, asking how to differentiate between the construction that implies a desired and plausible outcome from a desired but unlikely outcome, when he steps forward and perfunctorily pulls the PADD out of her fingers and examines her translation.

She feels every square centimetre of the space between them with such stark intensity that she wonders how he can possibly be so effortlessly still. His fingers fly over the screen of the PADD, making a correction, and she wants them on her skin.

"You have done an admirable job of maintaining the integrity and accuracy of the original text while rendering it in idiomatic Standard," Spock says, handing the PADD back over. "The distinction between the two usages is minute, but your assessment in this case was accurate. I have provided you with several texts which employ both constructions which you may use to practice."

He's staring at her for the first time, assessing her coolly, and she can't read anything in his expression. She wonders if he looks at everyone this way, as if he's cataloguing them, ever remote and impartial.

She takes the PADD back from him, careful to keep their fingers from brushing despite the fact that hers nearly _hurt_ from the urge to.

She doesn't need practice anymore, she thinks. She feels the difference between hoping for something you can't have and hoping for something you can hover in the space between them. For the first time, she curses the Vulcan language's careful precision.

…

In the end she's not dissuaded, because she knows how to deny herself the things she wants. She finishes Spock's class, and she speaks to him three more times before it's over, asking him questions that he answers politely. She's content to listen and to learn, and as Vulcan comes more and more fluidly to her mind, she feels her thoughts becoming ordered in a way they haven't before.

She uses it in her classes as she learns to modify the universal translator. It's delicate and organic and wild, and she loves it, but something Vulcan helps bring it to a kind of order that she can parse.

It feels oddly peaceful.

…

It's two days before her exam results are released, and she's not nervous – not _really_. But when she comes in, skin sweat-slicked from a run and finds a message from Commander Spock on her comm, she immediately feels her heart skip a beat.

It's a request for her to meet with him in his office at 0900. It's ruthlessly direct, pleasantries aren't necessary on Vulcan, but it doesn't give any indication as to the nature of the meeting. It's not CC'd, so she knows it's addressed to only her, and her mind can't help but supply all sorts of dire possibilities why he might be requesting to see her. She wonders, in a frantic sort of way, if somehow she's failed her final essay – somehow misread the question or failed to cite something properly.

By the time she turns up at 0900 her hair has been pulled back so tightly it feels a bit like she's given herself a facelift, and her uniform is pressed to the point where it might be able to stand up on its own. She knocks on his office door, and it springs open as he says, "come in."

"Have a seat, Cadet," he says, and she does, sitting ramrod straight in her chair and trying not to look as nervous as she feels.

"I have reviewed your final paper," he says, and she braces herself, preparing for all of her worst fears to come true, apologies and pleas hovering on the tip of her tongue. But he continues and says instead, "It was exemplary work."

Her breath rushes out in an audible whoosh, and she relaxes back into her chair, sagging with relief. Spock raises his eyebrows at her, looking perplexed.

She grins, a bit self-effacingly, and says, "Sorry. I thought you'd called me in to tell me I'd failed or something."

Spock stares at her for a moment, and she's fairly certain she's getting the Vulcan equivalent of the 'what have you been smoking?' look. "I had assume you would know that your work was of sufficient quality to warrant a passing grade," he says pointedly.

"I know," she replies awkwardly. "I just… wasn't sure why you'd asked to see me. I took a prepare for the worst, hope for the best approach."

"Inefficient when the worst is extraordinarily unlikely," he says, sitting back. "I asked for you to come because I am seeking a research assistant, and your academic track record suggests you may be qualified for the role."

She sits back up instantly. "Yes, sir."

Spock quirks an eyebrow at her, and she would swear that if he weren't a Vulcan he looked _amused_. He hands her a PADD over the desk and says, "Perhaps you would care to review the job description prior to agreeing."

She's already thumbing through it, skimming the research proposal. He's working on a project to increase the efficiency of the Universal Translator. It's mostly data entry, but she'll be inputting and correcting translations of documents in most of the major languages she's studying, and it's a reasonable number of hours per week.

"I would be happy to assist, sir," she says, and she can't quite keep the wide smile off her face. "Thank you for asking me."

He gives her a flat look. "You were the most qualified candidate," he says, and it does nothing to dim her smile. He carries on, turning to his computer. "I will be in the language lab between 1300 and 1800 on Tuesdays and Thursdays," he says. "I will require that you also attend at those times."

"Sure," she says.

His comm pings, suddenly, and he answers. It's Captain Kwan, asking him something about the computer science lab, and she tunes it out, glancing curiously around his office.

The room is warm, and fairly spartan save for a hand-drawn piece of calligraphy on the wall behind his desk. There's a curious vibrancy in the curve of the brushstrokes, the way they loop out just slightly too far and coil in too tightly. It sprawls a bit, like a cat in a sunbeam, and she can't help but smile at the incongruity of the statement – "_the mind controls the body; control the mind, and the body will follow_" with the cheeky scrawl.

Spock ends the call, and looks up at her, following her gaze and turning as he looks at the calligraphy on the wall behind him.

"It's lovely," Nyota says. "It's got such character."

Spock makes an odd sound of agreement in the back of his throat and puts her PADD down on his desk. "It is my mother's work," he says. "I believe she has something of an abundance of… character."

Nyota lets out a startled laugh, and he blinks. "Sorry," she says, still grinning.

Spock gives her an odd, indecipherable look, and then says, "that will be all, Cadet."

"See you Tuesday, sir," she replies happily.

…

Her job is both straightforward and immensely rewarding. She's fine-tuning translations, pouring over documents and tracking down patterns of things across languages the machine has trouble with. It's mostly idioms, and she comes across several she's never seen before.

Most of the input is audio, and she listens attentively, training her ear. She's starting to pick apart the accents of Vulcan, though they're subtle, and she feels a warm flush of pride at her own skill. There's something soothing about listening to Vulcan speech – though most of the texts are quite dull – and she finds herself leaving the lab at the end of the preternaturally calm.

She listens to Klingon opera, and hopes she'll never have to again, and Orion hymns. The hymns she loves, and she wants to listen to them again and again. They're raw and ragged and beautiful, full of joy, and they remind her of the songs of home and make her want to reach her hands up into the air and touch the sky.

But the oddest ones of all are the readings of pre-Surakian poetry. There's no way she can quite articulate how odd it is to hear poetry like that read in the dispassionate sounds of Vulcan. They're modern readers, of course, but the poetry itself is visceral and wild, and the words are full of sharp, jagged colour, rendered toneless and flat. It always leaves her off-kilter and unsettled, and she wonders what the Vulcans themselves make of it all.

She records them dutifully, checking the transcriptions and their translations, noting down the pieces, the organic fabric of the language, the computer is missing.

They don't speak much at first, but, gradually she begins to ask him questions, and Spock begins to open up. She asks about Surak, and about Vulcan. She asks about dialects, about his accent. He answers them all in turn, leaning forwards ever so slightly as he breathes life into the tenants of Surak, frames Vulcan logic in the shape of his posture and the sharpness of his brow and she understands better how he is his language made manifest.

But there are pieces of Spock that don't fit into his patterns of logic, and they slip out. He's _funny_, dry and sharp, and he always looks pleased when she laughs. She learns to spot contentment in the muscles around his eyes, and fatigue in the lowering of his brows, and it's as subtle as the pronunciations she's learning, but it gets easier with time.

She doesn't ask him about the love poetry, from before the time of Surak. She doesn't ask the questions that lie burning on the tip of her tongue about the passion of Vulcan's history, about the blood spilt on its sands, and the visceral nature of its love poetry, that makes her feel base and splayed open and wanting. She doesn't ask if he is like that underneath, if words still burn with such ferocity in their thoughts.

She wants to.

…

She starts to dream about him. They're uncertain dreams at first, in which she seduces him _logically_, though it's clear her mind doesn't quite know how to manage that.

She dreams of stripping off his clothes and seeing the faint gleam of pleasure in his eyes, the same one he gives her when she has a breakthrough in her work. She dreams of his hands on her skin, under her skirt, as she reads aloud in his tongue.

And sometimes, sometimes, she dreams of him wild and ruthless, pinning her to red sand and tracing his tongue through the valley between her breasts and down, down… Until she is pleading in a language designed for rational argument, trying to articulate her needs, how much she _burns_, and she calls forth ancient words and promises to bear open her mind, every ounce of herself, to his touch, and swears to spread her lifeblood upon the sand for the love of him.

…

They fall into a rhythm, and she finds it comforting. She looks forward to spending time in the lab, where it's almost always quiet. She always feels rested and centred when she leaves, no matter how long her day has been.

She sees the sunlight filter through the window as the evening grows later, and it turns his dark hair a warm auburn colour as he bends over his desk, brows drawn close in concentration. She wonders if this is what he looks like at home, under the light and warmth of the sun.

He seems to sense her scrutiny, and he looks up, wordlessly reaching out a hand for her work. When he passes it to her, her fingers brush his for the first time and she jumps.

She can feel the warmth of his skin lingering on hers, and she feels charged from his touch. He simply looks at her for a long moment, speculative and silent, before he says, "I believe this is a mis-translation, Cadet. T'Sal's annotated edition of the poem should provide a more comprehensive etymology of the word."

Then he looks down at his own work, placing the PADD on the table between them before she can reach for it.

…

Gaila is incandescent. There's really no other word to describe her.

When she walks into a room she takes up all the space in it, and Nyota loves living with her more than anything. Gaila laughs as freely as she gives, taking 'what's mine is yours' to such a literal extreme that Nyota can't even really tell whose clothes are whose anymore, but she doesn't much care.

They sometimes sit up late into the night, and Gaila talks to her in Orion, her voice a loud whisper like she's trying to be quiet but she can't quite contain herself. She talks of home sometimes, and that's nearly the only time Uhura sees her vulnerable and bittersweet. She never talks about the slave trade, about families pulled apart and girls half Gaila's age whispering stories about home to one another in perfumed prison cells. On the day they discuss it in class Gaila comes home and shuts the door to the bathroom and stays there, and Nyota doesn't know what to do so she sits on the floor by the bathroom door and she sings songs from home in Swahili and watches Gaila's shadow go still on the other side.

Gaila sings Orion hymns sometimes, and they both wind up on their feet dancing because they're the kind of songs you can't sing sitting still. And some nights, Gaila prays, though they always sound more like demands of the universe than requests. But they're prayers of peace and for joy and for freedom, and Nyota learns to say them along with her.

So, when one day Gaila comes in, her face wet with tears and her heart broken, Nyota feels an overwhelming urge of protectiveness. It's a fleeting sort of breakup, but the boy had been cruel and Gaila feels everything as deeply and as openly as she acts. So they spend the whole night watching terrible holovids in they pyjamas and eating ice cream straight from the tub, wrapped in the fuzziest blankets they can find, and she winds up falling asleep in a cocoon made of bedding just as the sun is rising.

It's 1255 when she wakes, and she shrieks so loudly Gaila nearly has a heart attack and flings clean clothes on before dashing over to the labs. She's breathless and sweaty when she turns up, and her apology tumbles out of her in a rush. "I'm so sorry, sir. My roommate was having a crisis and I was up late and I lost track of time."

Spock's as unflappable as always, but there's something faintly dazed about the way he's frozen, hands hovering over the data pad, and staring at her. "Is your roommate well?" he asks.

"What? Oh, yes. Mostly," she says, taking a seat at the console across from him. "She just had a messy breakup is all. But she's already moved on from cursing the guy's name with what sounded like serious Orion voodoo to the ice cream stage, so I expect she'll be fine."

Spock looks like he has absolutely no idea what to say to that. "Is the application of sweetened dairy products a typical response to the termination of a relationship?"

She wants to laugh at the odd, earnest curiosity in his voice, but she manages to hold it in. "Well, all cultures develop rituals around the grieving process," she says. "Ice cream is pretty typical, yes."

Spock frowns faintly, tilting his head slightly. "You would consider the termination of a relationship grounds for grieving?"

The air seems to rush out of her lungs at that, and she can't quite help but stare. "Well, yes," she says, finally. "Ending a relationship means losing someone close to you."

"Fascinating," is all he says, and he turns back to his scanner, apparently satisfied.

It's odd, but for the first time she truly senses how wide the gap between them really is. She realises that all along she'd been thinking of him as human, and that something about his intellectual curiosity about something that seemed to her so fundamental, and so obvious, makes him truly seem _alien_ for the first time to her.

She tries to shake it off, because, really, she should have known better, but she can't quite help but think that the time has long come to change words like 'humanity', because it's clear that – though Spock is _inhuman_ – humans are not the sole keepers of goodness and compassion any longer.

…

She's not sure when they tip the balance from teacher and student to friend, but she knows they're on the other side now. Spock lets little bits of information about himself come out in tiny drops, and she catches them all and keeps them close.

She learns his mother is human, and she thinks of the bold hand that wrote the calligraphy is Spock's office, and the way Spock's eyes glint in wry humour when he talks about some of his first year undergraduates' utter inability to grasp the concept of a semi-colon, and she thinks that Amanda Grayson is probably a force of nature. Nyota pictures her as having a wicked sense of humour, and the same dignity her own mother has – a way of carrying herself that speaks of self-possession and power, but has soft edges and warm, motherly hands. And, when Spock speaks of her, though his words are neutral she knows that he loves her very much.

She learns that is father doesn't speak to him because he joined Starfleet, and she watches all the sharp edges of Spock's defences rise and wonders if the stiff way he holds himself and the tightness in his jaw is his father's legacy.

She talks to him about home, and about the way she used to drive out with her sister towards the highlands and just park and stare up at the stars trying to count them all. She talks about the way her mother would sing as she spoke, and tell them stories full of beautiful puns that would never fail to make her laugh.

She tells him some, and Swahili sounds odd and thick on his tongue when he repeats it back, his natural even tone ill-suited to such a musical language. But when she gets frustrated a week later, stumbling over a mis-translation, he simply fetches her a warm cup of tea from the replicator and says, "Kujikwa si kuanguka,bali ni kwenda mbele."

She holds the cup, warm between her hands and smells the deep, spiced scent of the tea, and wants to tear his veneer of logic and rationality from him to get a proper look at what lies beneath.

…

She stumbles across the word in one of the Vulcan texts, and doesn't hesitate to ask Spock what it means.

He seems to puzzle over how to articulate it for a moment before he speaks. "It is a word that signifies something less than a marriage, but greater than a betrothal," he says at last.

"Greater how?"

"Vulcan children are bonded to their betrothed from a young age," he says. "The mind link facilitates a degree of closeness that is more intimate than an engagement, by your standards."

She can't help but ask. "Children? And you too? I mean… "

"My father arranged my bonding when I was seven," Spock confirms solemnly.

"_Seven_?" She sits back. "How can you choose someone to spend the rest of your life with when you're seven? When I was seven I wanted to be a veterinarian and a professional cookie taster."

Spock's eyebrows shoot up at that, but he lets it slide. "The parents of both children assess their capabilities and their weaknesses and endeavor to find a complementary match. It is an efficient system."

"Do you like her?" she asks, leaning forward and resting her chin in her hand. "Your fiancée?"

Spock thinks for a moment, his lips pursed together, and then says, "I admire her. I do not believe, however, she would be much impressed if I liked her, even if I were inclined to."

She watches him as he returns to work, something rigid and defensive in the set of his back as he bends over a PADD, and she can't help but feel sympathy for him, bound forever by an assessment made at an age so young it probably bore little resemblance to the adult he'd become. She doubts very much that Spock's father had factored his leaving to join Starfleet into his calculations.

When she picks her tea back up to take a sip, it is cold.

…

She can sense every square centimeter of space between them, and the air feels charged with anticipation.

In her dreams he reads poetry, pressing phrases of ancient Vulcan into her skin with his tongue and his hands, and says he loves her beyond all reason.

In the lab he sits, still and quiet, and his hands never touch her, and he never speaks of love. But she knows he watches her sometimes, and she crosses her long legs and keeps her eyes fixed on her work, feeling his gaze on her like a caress.

It's like a game – how close can she get without touching. She feels her skin prickle as she walks by him to fetch tea from the replicator, when she takes a PADD from his hand and places hers on the still-warm space where his just was. She never crosses the line, but it nearly kills her, because everything in her is calling out to him like the needle of a compass.

He walks behind her, reaching around to peer over her shoulder and look over her work. Their bodies do not touch, but she feels the warmth of him radiating against her back, and she can smell his skin – spiced soap and incense. She keeps her head facing forwards because if she turned she could reach out and press her lips to his cheek, to the point of his ear. He's reading slowly and deliberately, and every hair on her body is painfully conscious of every movement he makes. Then he stands, and she shivers.

Sometimes she thinks he might be playing the game too.

…

They have been pulling the string taut for weeks now, and she knows it's going to snap, but she's still surprised when it does.

It begins with a book.

Perhaps, when she factors in that the book in question was a selection of Vulcan love poetry, it wasn't nearly so surprising, but when Spock mentions he has a copy in his quarters and suggests she stop by to pick it up before returning home, she thinks nothing of it.

But his home is warm and inviting, decorated in the Vulcan style and with the environmental controls cranked up to what she's affectionately dubbed 'furnace', and he runs one long, elegant finger down the screen of his library database, scrolling through to find the right title. She suddenly feels very, very out of place, but Spock doesn't seem to notice.

He downloads it to a PADD and hands it to her.

"May I ask," he says, "why you find these poems so intriguing?"

Her heart flutters in her chest, but her voice is calm when she speaks. "I find the evolution of your language fascinating. There is almost no other language that I have studied that has gone through such a deliberate and artificial re-structuring of grammar and vocabulary. I appreciate the symmetry and the refinement of modern Vulcan, but I _feel_ the power and ecstasy of the Ancient form."

"It is difficult," Spock says, his voice low and soft, "to appreciate one's own past when it seems so utterly disparate. I have vowed to hold myself upon the path of logic, because it offers peace and clarity of thought. But I believe in doing so I have lost the capacity to evaluate that which I have left behind."

"You mean this doesn't make you feel anything?" she says, holding the PADD up.

"I do not succumb to emotion," he replies, and it sounds well practiced.

"Would you like me to read it?" she asks before she's had a chance to really think this through. "It was odd, listening to the recordings," she adds. "Poetry like this is about preserving emotions in ink, and reading it without emotion means you lose most of it in translation, so to speak."

Spock looks intrigued now, and he gestures for her to take a spot on the couch. "Please," he says.

She sits, and he sits across from her, his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers steepled, his expression intent. She clears her throat nervously, and begins to read.

"If you should take me,  
In the middle of the night, out to the desert,  
By my hair or by my hand,  
I would not submit.  
If you should take me,  
Beneath the stars, or upon sun-baked sand,  
With your tongue and fingers,  
I would not submit."

Spock leans forwards, and she glances up at him to meet his gaze. There is heat there, but he stays very still like he's waiting for something. She swallows, and then says, "_Spock_."

His eyes flicker shut and back open and he seems to uncoil as he moves forward, shifting his weight until his hand rests on the back of the couch beside her.

"If you should take me," she says, and he reaches out and runs his fingers ever so gently down the length of her own, and the PADD in her hand visibly shakes. "Under my mother's roof."

She feels a heady rush of sensation from the contact of his fingers, and it tingles all the way up her arm. His touch feels electric and wild, and she keeps reading, her voice unsteady and wanting. "And kiss me roughly as you spread open my legs."

Spock makes a low sound in his throat, and she drops the PADD to the floor and pulls him towards her for a kiss, tangling her hands in his soft hair and all but crawling into his lap. He's strong enough to hold her in place, and he pulls back out of the kiss and looks up at her. She can see the fragments of his self-control gathering around him, as he forces his expression into something neutral that still can't hide the faint tinge of green on his cheeks.

"This is unwise," he says, and his voice is low and rough even through his usual phlegmatic tone.

"Do you want me to stop?" She will, if he asks, of course, but she's desperately hoping he won't ask because she has never, in all her life, wanted anything more than the feel of his hair tangled in her fingers and the press of his lips.

"I am a professor at the academy and you are a student," he says. "There could be accusations of misconduct."

"You're not _my_ professor anymore," she says. "There's no clear regulation about fraternization between cadets and officers."

He gives her a look that makes it clear he's aware of how thin her argument is. "I would not wish my actions to be to the detriment of your career."

"And yours?" she asks, sitting back.

"Or mine," he agrees.

They are at another tipping point, teetering on the brink together, and she feels him inching away from the cliff. She sees before her the long stretches of days in the lab, of proximity but not _closeness_, of friendship alone, and she knows that's not what she wants at all. She'll take it, if she has to, but now that she's here, on the brink, she wants to leap over the edge and fly.

"I don't care," she says forcefully, after a moment. "We're not breaking any official rules, and we'll be careful to make sure no one will suspect you've pulled strings for me. No one would believe it, anyway, that a Vulcan would be _emotionally_ compromised."

Spock looks unusually grave. "Perhaps they would not," he says. "But they would be in error." She thinks he's going to push her off, to refuse her, and she braces herself for rejection, for picking up the pieces of her dignity and taking what friendship she can from him, ever living in the shadow of this moment and what it could have been.

But then he kisses her, fiercely, in answer, pulling her back down into his lap. His hands are sliding up her thighs, hiking up her skirt and grinding her down atop him.

She can't resist the temptation to run her tongue along the tip of his ear, and his fingers clench tight around her hips and she feels a shockwave of pleasure radiate from him into her and back again, ebbing and flowing, and she shuts her eyes and is lost.

Later, when his hands are on her skin, tracing out calligraphic swirls on her back with tight Vulcan precision, as if he isn't sprawled naked beside her, she presses gentle kisses to his collarbone, his lips and his forehead and thinks of all the things about him she loves best. She thinks about the way his voice sharpens slightly when he's curious, and drawls with sarcasm. She thinks of his hands, the way he steeples them, the way he touches her, the way they feel on her skin. She thinks of the first day of his class, of the beauty of Vulcan, of the joy she feels now, here.

He doesn't answer in words, but he rolls them both over and brings her legs up over his hips and presses long kisses into her skin as their hands tangle together and hold tight.

…

In truth, very little changes after that. They still work in the lab, she still asks questions, and now, sometimes, she goes home with him and she traces all the new words she's learned into his skin with her fingers.

It is a sort of contentment she could never have imagined for herself until this moment, but she wants to hold them here, out of time, in the hush of their shared secrets and naked skin.

But in the end, it doesn't work like that at all. Because the next day, they receive a distress call from Vulcan, and it all falls apart.  
…

But if you should take me,  
To such places lovers go,  
With your heart and with your thoughts,  
I will be yours.

– Collection 2, Fr 6, Fragment of a Love Poem, T'Paal region.

* * *

**End Notes**:

[1] _Kujikwa si kuanguka,bali ni kwenda mbele:_ To stumble is not falling down but it is to go forward.

[2] 'Bedroom Hymns' is nicked from Florence + The Machine.

Finally, since I'm here anyway, in response to the person who left a review saying they were very off-put by the T'Pring storyline – I am sorry it ruined the story for you. I can see why it might not be everyone's cup of tea, so no hard feelings at all on that front. What I do take umbrage with, however, is your implication that the blame is on Uhura for taking part in a relationship with Spock. _Spock_ is the one who is cheating, and it's not Uhura's responsibility to prevent him from doing so, nor her fault if he does.


End file.
